When the Sentinel tightened its financial belt back in June, it lost a wealth of seasoned veterans, many of them editors. Those journalists not only wrote headlines and captions. They also scrutinized the work of reporters — correcting spelling, straightening out syntax, double-checking facts — before publication.
With fewer people to do that now, less of that important work gets done, and the result is more published errors.

Yesterday, the ombudsman of the Washington Post wrote basically the same column:

…Growing numbers of readers are contacting the ombudsman to complain about typos and small errors.

"As a virtually lifelong subscriber, I am disheartened by the increasingly poor quality of the editing of The Post," wrote Richard Murphy of Alexandria. If typos can’t be caught by a spell-checker, "then The Post should restore a couple of copy editor positions. You have cut that staff too much."

The Post’s copy editors are among the best I’ve worked with during nearly four decades in the newspaper business. But they’ve been badly depleted by staff cuts as the money-losing paper struggles to control costs. Those who remain are stretched thin while The Post expands to a 24-hour news operation in print and online.

Between early 2005 and mid-2008, the number of full-time copy editors dropped from about 75 to 43 through buyouts or voluntary departures. It has declined further since then, but Post managers won’t provide precise figures beyond saying that six took a recent buyout offer. The need is so critical that most are being hired back on contract through at least the end of the year, and part-timers are taking up some of the slack.

Copy editors are the unsung heroes of newsrooms. Unknown to the public, and often underappreciated by their colleagues, they’re the last line of defense against a correction or, worse, a libel suit…

"By definition, you’ll see more errors when there’s reduced staffing," said Bill Walsh, the A-section copy desk chief. On a typical weeknight a few years ago, Walsh said, the three copy desks handling national, foreign and business news could rely on perhaps 20 editors. Those desks have since been combined into one desk, headed by Walsh. Today, he said, "there are some shifts where I’m looking at seven or eight people total."…

These papers are by no means the only ones experiencing a spike in errors due to the loss of bodies on the copy desk. Adding to the problem is the fact that the move online means papers are churning out more content than ever before. Yet copy editors — and magazine fact checkers — are being shown the door.

Carl Sessions Stepp examined how some newsrooms are coping with this challenge is his recent article, "The Quality-Control Quandary,” It’s a must-read. I fear, though, that few organizations are rethinking their quality control process and means of verification. They’re just trying to do more with less. It’s a recipe for disaster.

I looked at this issue in a recent essay I wrote for Harvard’s Niemen Neiman Reports:

For more than 100 years, one of the most recognizable slogans in journalism has been “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” Lately, The New York Times motto is being challenged by the familiar phrase, “do more with less.” This new saying was, in fact, the theme of the World Editors Forum scheduled for March, but the event had to be cancelled “due to the impact of the global financial downturn on newspaper companies.”

News organizations are shedding employees. Those that remain are expected to pick up the slack and also push ahead with digital initiatives. Included in the exodus are valuable copyeditors—the people in whose encyclopedic brains reside a lot of what prevents errors from surfacing in stories. The few, the proud—and disappearing—magazine fact checkers are also being told to grab their World Almanacs and Book of Facts and move along.

Accuracy is a huge journalistic challenge. When reporters are asked to take on more work while the newsroom’s same fallible processes and error-prone technologies remain in place, the result will undoubtedly be a further downward slide in quality. More errors will be followed by more apologies and more corrections. And this is happening at a critical time for journalism—a time when consumers are being asked by journalists using digital media to lend support to their newsgathering mission…

… Generally, the Star believes that unpublishing is a serious act as it erases the online history of the Star’s journalism. The Star’s policy on this states that while we indeed take seriously concerns of inaccuracy and will correct articles online, just as we do in the newspaper, we do not unpublish articles from our websites. This policy here is similar to that of other major newspapers, including the Washington Post, The New York Times and the Guardian.
If the Star ascertains that a mistake has been published, we correct it. Online, that means editing the text and also appending notes to the articles to tell readers that a correction has been made.
“Just as in print, the Star stands behind what it publishes online. Our purpose is to disclose information, not to hide information because it makes someone unhappy,” says Neil Sanderson, the Star’s assistant managing editor, digital. “If things started disappearing from our websites, readers might suspect that we were trying to conceal an error.
“As well, the stories that we publish are part of the historical record of our city, our province and our country,” he said. “To remove these stories from our archive would leave holes in our history.”

Derek Donovan, readers’ representative at the Kansas City Star, dedicated his end of year column to thanking readers for helping the paper correct errors. Excerpt:

One of my most important jobs at The Kansas City Star is tracking the corrections that run on Page A-2, and I was recently reminded how vital a role readers play in that process …
While appending a correction last Friday, I remembered vividly the caller who’d pointed out the mistake — dollar amounts for police badges that didn’t make sense as written. I then flipped through the previous month’s corrections tally and realized just how many of them came directly from readers, many of whom had no personal interest other than a desire to see The Star set the record straight …
The great collective wisdom of readers comes from the thousands of specialists who follow the news related to their specific areas of interest. I know I can always rely on military buffs to pick apart inaccurate descriptions of the patches on soldiers’ uniforms, or proud moms and dads who let me know when a school has sent in an incomplete team roster or honor roll. No mistake is truly trivial.
So I offer a sincere thanks to you, the readers. You’re directly responsible for alerting me to a huge percentage of those errors that result in corrections (435 so far this year). The Star is obviously far from perfect, but your attention to detail makes it better.

Frustrated by the inability to do anything about the high cost of fuel or groceries and the egg-frying-on-the-sidewalk South Texas heat, let’s turn to something you and I have the ability to change for the better:
Making the San Antonio Express-News the most trusted, respected and accurate source of news and information in this region.
That high-minded language, by the way, is right out of the Preamble to our new Ethics and Practices policy.
One way to gain respect and credibility is to admit it when you’ve done wrong. To that end, the Express-News publishes corrections on Page 2A, under a headline “Setting it straight,” Many of the corrections you see there are reported by readers…
Last year, the newspaper published 494 Setting it Straights, about 41 per month.
This year, through May, corrections are down by an average of 10 per month. In only one month, January, have Setting it Straights even hit the 40 mark. But it’s early. Last Thursday we published eight corrections on 2A, the most in a long spell.
And while we ran nearly 500 Setting it straights in 2007 and are closing in on 200 so far this year, that’s not to say that journalists here – or South Texas readers – catch or admit every error…
The Express-News has long held that corrections shouldn’t repeat the error. For example, don’t say: “The Missions beat Frisco, 3-1, Saturday night, not, 3-2, as was reported on Page 10C of Sports on Sunday.” Instead, say: “The Missions’ score, as reported on Page 10C Sunday, was incorrect. The Missions won, 3-1.
The new ethics code allows for flexibility in writing corrections, designed to clarify mistakes for readers, rather than leave them wondering what was wrong…

In July of last year, Joel Charlebois, a Toronto resident, caught a man trying to break into his home. While trying to escape, the man fell from a second floor deck. He ended up breaking a leg and couldn’t complete his getaway. Charlebois called the police and then proceeded to take pictures of the man. Torontoist has the photos; Charlebois’ Flickr stream is here.

In a post on Flickr, Charlebois explains what happened next:

While waiting for the police and ambulance to arrive, I took photos of the burglar as he lay on the ground below. A newsman from Citytv also came to the scene. I refused his request for an interview. As he was poking around the property, I asked him to leave. We spoke briefly — he was nice enough; it’s the media that I find objectionable. I mentioned that I had taken pictures of the perpetrator and was looking forward to posting them on my Flickr site. He was interested in seeing them, so I provided him with a card. I left that afternoon for a weekend in Montreal. When I returned home, a friend showed me his recording of the news story which is when I discovered that Citytv had lifted my photos from my Flickr site for their broadcast.

The photos were aired on CablePulse24, a 24-hour local news station operated by CityTV. The station did not credit Charlebois as the photographer, and it did not contact him for permission prior to airing the photos. Charlebois registered a complaint with the station, writing:

The story that was broadcast on CityTV and CP24 (and presumably streamed on CP24.com, as well) included my photographs of the suspect as he lay on the ground below. The material was stolen from my Flickr site without my permission and without crediting me, for commercial use and your sole financial gain.

The station replied and said Charlebois had given verbal permission to use the photos by handing the reporter a business card and saying his photos would be on Flickr. Obviously, that doesn’t explain why the station didn’t credit Charlebois for the photos.

Unsatisfied with the reply, Charlebois filed a complaint with the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, a “non-governmental organization created by the Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB) to administer standards established by its members, Canada’s private broadcasters.”

A CBSC panel found that the station violated “Article 11 regarding Intellectual Property of the RTNDA -The Association of Electronic Journalists of Canada RTNDA Code of (Journalistic) Ethics.” It reads:

Plagiarism is unacceptable. Broadcast journalists will strive to honour the intellectual property of others, including video and audio materials.

It’s interesting to see plagiarism mentioned in this example. The station downloaded (copied) Charlebois’ photos and then broadcast them without offering proper credit. That certainly seems like a form of plagiarism, though Charlebois avoided the p-word and simply called the station thieves. (For another, different example of visual plagiarism, see here and here.)

In its decision, the CBSC panel addressed the issue of “fair dealing” (known as “fair use” in the U.S.). This, in the words of the panel, offers “an exception … to the restrictive demands of copyright protection” for those engaged in news reporting. But one cornerstone of fair dealing is that news organizations must respect the copyright of others by offering credit to the copyright holder. That’s the “fair” part of the equation.

As a resolution, the CBSC has ordered CablePulse24 to air this statement twice during prime time:

The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has found that CablePulse 24 breached Article 11 of the Radio-Television News Directors Association – The Association of Electronic Journalists’ Code of Ethics in its broadcast of a news report of a bungled burglary on July 25, 2007. As a part of its coverage of the story, CP24 included three still photographs of the injured burglar without providing any credit to the photographer, whose identity was known to the broadcaster. By failing to provide that accreditation, the broadcaster has failed to honour the intellectual property rights of the photographer, contrary to the provisions of Article 11 of the RTNDA Code of (Journalistic) Ethics.

Note that the statement does not mention Charlebois by name, nor does it require an apology by the station. Torontoist spoke to Charlebois to get his reaction:

Charlebois is ambivalent about the decision: he told Torontoist that he’s most concerned over credit—all that he wanted—because the statement that City must read makes no mention of his name. “This announcement mentions where [City] wronged,” he told us, “but it does not set things right if they continue to withhold credit for the work.” Even if they don’t say his name, however, Charlebois does find one thing particularly rewarding: that this was the first time the CBSC has called on a panel to resolve an issue of plagiarism under the Code of Ethics, and the resulting decision sets a precedent for news organizations around the country. “These matters,” Charlebois told us, “require discussion as traditional media wrestle with the worthy opponent it is finding in alternative/online media.”

It’s remarkable that Charlebois still won’t receive credit for his photographs.

Prior to my presentation, we sat down for an interview during which English told me that the paper was embarking on several accuracy-related projects. One was to build a corrections database to track the paper’s errors; another was to update the paper’s corrections style.

English was nice enough to write a column about my presentation and book. Now it’s my turn to interview her. We spoke via email about the Star’s new corrections style, how the paper encourages readers to report errors, and whether the phrase “regret the error” is a useful addition to a correction.

*Editor’s Note: An unfinished version of this post was mistakenly published on Wednesday morning. As a result, the sentence “The Star is Canada’s highest circulation daily, and one of very few media outlets in the country that has a full-time public editor/ombudsman” left out the word “few.” Thanks to David and Steve for spotting that mistake. Update: I’ve also fixed a few typos that didn’t cause any factual errors, including a misspelling of the word “interview” in the headline (forgot the “r”). Thanks to Eric and Aldous. On with the Q&A…

Who decided that the paper’s corrections style needed to be updated?
When I took on the role of public editor at the Star last May, I initiated a review of the paper’s corrections policy and practices. This was approved by my boss, publisher, Jagoda Pike, with the full co-operation of editor-in-chief Fred Kuntz. That’s not to suggest that the paper did not have vigorous corrections policies and practices in place. My predecessor, Sharon Burnside, did an excellent job of keeping the Star accountable to its readers through corrections and the Star has long had an accuracy and corrections policy.

I came to the Star from the Globe and Mail where I had served on an “integrity committee” that had looked at the paper’s corrections policies and I had put a lot of work into researching best practices in newspaper corrections. It seemed appropriate to bring what I had learned to my new challenge at the Star.

As well, the goal of the public editor bringing more accountability to the Star’s corrections process through a tracking system that would help the newsroom learn from published errors was very clearly part of the mandate I took on with this role. I am happy to say I report to a publisher who has strong views on this newspaper’s responsibility for accuracy and the need for accountability for accuracy. I could hardly launch a system for tracking errors without fully understanding and reviewing the Star’s Accuracy and Corrections policy.

What caused the change?
We haven’t significantly changed the way corrections are written, beyond deciding not to print “the Star regrets the error” in all corrections and trying to be consistent about what should be included in corrections.

The most significant change is the presentation. Corrections are now published under a “Corrections” label, rather than with individual headlines. Our policy calls for all news corrections to run in a prominent position on Page A2 (or 3) and corrections for Sports, Business, Living and Entertainment to run in the same location in those sections. This is not a change from longstanding practice at the Star.

When you sat down to think about the new style, what were the main things you wanted to achieve?
The most important goal of our corrections is to serve the reader — and the record — by stating the correct information so that readers clearly know what is accurate. Corrections should be clear, concise and direct and indicate to readers what we got wrong. Our style aims to first state the correct fact and then to provide the broad context of what was wrong without necessarily repeating the error. We don’t follow the correct information with the general statement of “incorrect information was published” because we think we should inform readers about what went wrong. They should not have to guess at what we are correcting.

Corrections must also include the calendar date the original article was published (not the day of the week because that becomes meaningless online) and the brief context of that article.

As well, corrections had traditionally referred to an error in a “story” and I changed that to “article”. I think article is a better word for newspaper readers because “story” could create (unconscious) connotations of fiction. To me, article more clearly denotes fact, which is what we provide to readers.

We also had much debate about whether to ascribe blame in published corrections by denoting whether the mistake was “due to an editing error.” (Or, “due to a reporting error.”) The policy here has long been that publishing the Star is a team endeavor and we do not publicly ascribe blame for errors. We have not changed that. However, our new Accuracy Tracker system will help us to learn much more internally about the cause of errors.

What was the process for creating the new style?
The review of the Star’s accuracy and corrections policy was part of an overall Star “Credibility Committee” that is currently revising and updating the Star’s Policy and Ethics manual to ascertain that newsroom policies reflect the realities of 21st century/multimedia journalism. I headed the accuracy and corrections committee of nine editors and reporters. This committee looked at all aspects of the Star’s corrections policy and practices, in the light of what is considered best practice in North American newsrooms. We looked at online corrections, what we correct and the wording and placement of corrections. I then drafted an updated policy, which was approved by the Credibility Committee (co-chaired by me and the editor-in-chief). It will be published in a new manual in coming months.

This process took place over several months and throughout, I tried to provide information to the newsroom about best practices in corrections by posting a number of research articles on the newsroom intranet. Inviting you to the Star to speak about accuracy and corrections was also part of my initiative to try to spark more discussion about this important topic.

Some of the new corrections repeat the incorrect information (”A recipe for Bourbon Apple Cake misstated the amount of butter that should be used in Step 2. It is one and a half sticks, not cups…”) while others don’t (”The potential savings from driving a highly fuel efficient hybrid car (after 96,000 kms and if fuel reached European-like gas prices of $2 a litre) would be approximately $900. An incorrect savings estimate was published…”). How do you choose when to include the incorrect information?
You are right. While our goal is consistency and my preferred corrections style is to state the correct information first, sometimes that simply does not best serve the reader and it makes more sense to start out by stating what was wrong (the New York Times style) and then provide the correct information. We do this sparingly and only after determining that our standard style doesn’t work best. I do believe that stating the correct information is the most important goal of a correction and it should be the “lead”, but I reserve the right to alter that if it doesn’t clearly communicate to readers. Consistency is important but sometimes the “formula” doesn’t work.

It appears as though the new corrections have ditched the phrase “The Star regret the error.” Why was that no longer needed?
Our committee gave serious consideration to dropping this sentence that has long been included at the end of all corrections in the Star. I like the polite civility of it, but there was general agreement that this phrase has come to sound somewhat satirical (please don’t take this wrong, but I wonder if that is a result of your website making the phrase “Regret the Error” sound somewhat insincere when it appears in print in the daily newspaper.) I also looked at the style of other newspapers and “Regret the Error” is not generally used these days.

I don’t think that sentence was particularly meaningful or significant to readers. I also think it’s a given that the Star regrets all of our errors; the fact that we are addressing them in a published correction is evident of that and so too is our move to track errors to try to learn from, and minimize them. That’s not to say there won’t be occasions when we do explicitly express our regret.

Have you received any reader feedback about the new corrections style?
None whatsoever.

Do more readers read the printed corrections than those published online, or vice versa?
I expect more readers read the corrections published in the newspaper.

What kind of traffic does your online corrections page get?
I spoke to our web editor and she tells me the traffic to that page is almost nil.

Apart from the writing of the corrections, have any other things changed, such as placement etc.?
The most significant change for the reader is that we no longer run headlines with corrections. The headlines took up a lot of space and essentially could not say much but repeat the content of the correction. I looked at corrections in numerous other papers and saw that most run corrections under a “Corrections” label, without individual headlines and it made sense to do the same here.

We’ve also started publishing information on the Page 2 Index to indicate the Star’s commitment to accuracy and tell readers how to report a possible error. This is in addition to the online initiatives to guide readers to how to report possible errors.

The most significant change for Star journalists is that we now monitor corrections in the Toronto Star Accuracy Tracker, an online form that helps the Star track and monitor corrections and reasons for errors. The purpose is to help the newspaper learn from mistakes so that we can continually strive for higher levels of editorial excellence. It requires that department heads, in consultation with staff, provide the required information about the reason and origin of errors to the public editor’s office following publication of a correction. Here’s a link to the public editor column I wrote about this.

There is a little link next to every online story that allows people to “Report typo or correction.” How long has this been in place, and where do those emails go? How often do readers use it?
I believe this was put in place by my predecessor, Sharon Burnside, working with our online team. All of these emails go directly to the public editor’s mailbox which is monitored by my office (myself and Public Editor Associate, Joan Vander Doelen) from 9 a.m. to about 6 p.m. Monday to Friday. We don’t routinely monitor during nights and weekends, but I usually take a look each night and on Saturday and Sunday to determine if there is any major issue in need of correction.

Readers use this throughout the day — it varies from day to day of course, but on average, we probably receive about 30-40 emails daily through this link. The issues can be relatively minor, such as typos in articles that have been just posted to thestar.com, or can be significant requests for correction to articles that were published in the newspaper and online and that require significant amounts of time and effort to verify. We investigate all of these reader emails and take appropriate action to correct when necessary and make sure the correction is followed through online, in print and in the Star’s archives.

Any more corrections-related changes planned for the future?
The next step of this process is to overhaul our online Corrections page and to link all online corrections to the online articles they correct. Our online corrections policy calls for this and other measures to create more transparency about corrections and changes to online articles. We still have much work ahead to create a consistent correction environment in the newspaper and online, but we do have a clear sense of direction on this.

I’m also looking forward to what we learn from our Accuracy Tracker about why some errors occur and what systemic problems might be responsible for these. Our goal is to be a leader in newspaper accuracy and corrections practices and I’ll be continuing to research best practices throughout the industry to determine how we can improve the accuracy and accountability of Canada’s largest newspaper. Our readers deserve nothing less.

Has your organization recently changed its corrections policy, or enacted a new accuracy-related program? Email me so we can do an interview.

The sourcing and fact checking process for stories on the BBC News website must be addressed by management, the BBC trust Editorial Standards Committee has recommended.
The committee made the suggestions as part of its response to a complaint about an article on the site, which pointed to inaccuracies in the report on Congressman Joseph P Kennedy II’s marriage to Sheila Rauch.
During the complaints procedure, the online news team conceded to oversimplifying the story and admitted that this could mislead the reader.

From the committee’s findings:

• The article had been fundamentally flawed and the complainant had provided useful and accurate information to assist the web team in correcting the story.
• The web team should have acted more quickly in its responses to the complainant to ensure the story was corrected sooner than it was.
• The wider issue of sourcing and checking stories for the news website was something for BBC management to address.
• [The committee] would write to BBC management to request it reviews its policies as to the sourcing and checking of material facts within articles prior to publication on the BBC website.

…when I wrote in Saturday’s story about HBO that George Washington stepped down from the presidency after serving only one term, it was just a stupid, blind error, the sort that leaves you smiting your forehead, literally and repeatedly, the moment it is pointed out to you.

For the six or seven people living in the Los Angeles Basin who did not e-mail to correct me, he served two terms, not one. And my daddy was a history teacher! Ever since the first e-mail hit my box (on Friday afternoon, about two seconds after the story went up on the website), I have been bathed in hot shame. But I want to thank you, well, most of you, for the gentle tone you took — most clever subject line award goes to: Is a TV Critic Smarter Than a 5th Grader? — though I certainly deserved all those incredulous exclamation marks as well. And yes, I did go to college. Graduated even.

Also, for the record, we entertainment writers are held just as accountable for flubbed historical references as any other journalist. The correction runs today online and in tomorrow’s print edition, and I will try to comfort myself with the knowledge that a good, strong dose of humility is always good for the soul. Especially the soul of a critic.

Thanks, Tim!

…This paper ran a William Kristol column from The New York Times on its editorial page March 18 repeating a claim that Sen. Barack Obama had attended services at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago on July 22, 2007, when the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. “blamed the ‘arrogance’ of the ‘United States of White America’ for much of the world’s suffering, especially the oppression of blacks.”
The day before that column appeared here, The New York Times had corrected it online, stating the Obama campaign had provided information showing that the senator did not attend services at Trinity that day. He was in Miami.
About two dozen readers contacted Opinion editors and me to ask why this paper had run the column anyway. Most didn’t note and perhaps didn’t know that the correction had appeared only online.
One reader declared the mistake “a major faux pas.” William E.J. Heffner called this “scandalously bad journalism,” adding, “I don’t know how anyone outside of a hermitage could be unaware of it.”
Incredible as this must seem to people who are perpetually tuned in to talk radio or wired to the Web, Union-Tribune editors didn’t know about that online correction. There’s not much time to patrol the Internet when you have deadlines to meet, and an editor who’s already copy edited a column isn’t likely to seek it out again.
I think the Times’ news service let us down here; it didn’t transmit a correction until 8 p.m. Tuesday, a day after it was posted online.
Clark Hoyt, the public editor at the Times, checked and found that editors have typically sent out corrections based on when they would be printed in the Times. “The process has been changed as a result of this Kristol error,” Hoyt said, “and corrections will be sent by the news service as soon as they are posted online. Another example of change in the new age of technology.”
Thanks to alert readers, Robert A. Kittle, editor of the Editorial page, and Bernie Jones, Opinion page editor, got in a correction on Page B9 on Wednesday. Hoyt thought it would run with the Kristol column in the Times today.

Unfortunately, many media outlets fail this test. Just have a look at these corrections. Too many corrections are vague, confusing, or downright frustrating. What was incorrect? How did it happen? What article are you talking about? Fortunately, Vaden brings word of changes at the News & Observer. (He also very kindly makes reference to my book.)

Linda Williams, N&O senior editor who oversees corrections, says relief is at hand. “There was a sort of format that discouraged people from restating the error,” she said. “We’re changing that whole idea and trying to write corrections that make it clear what was wrong and what is correct.”

Williams said the paper also is doing more staff training to prevent errors and encouraging readers to alert the paper to errors. There is an e-mail address — accuracy@newsobserver.com — to send notice of errors, and the paper has started a computer database of errors to better identify how they occur and can be prevented.

All encouraging steps.

Maybe it’s working. The N&O in 2007 printed 553 corrections, reversing a three-year upward trend that reached 680 in 2006. “I hope the reason we’re having fewer errors is that we’re doing a better job of prevention,” Williams said. But she’s also concerned about the impact of recent staff losses of copy editors and design editors, who are the last defense in catching mistakes.

“You can do a lot of training to prevent people from making errors,” she said. “But a lot of errors are caught because you’re reading a proof and it jumps out on the page when you see it. My concern is that we won’t have the time to do that last step when someone looks at it and catches it on the page.”

The paper did manage to reduce corrections despite having fewer people last year. Let’s hope that continues.

It good to see the paper is working on improving quality even in the face of staff losses. Many outlets are  dealing with shrunken newsrooms and it’s all too easy to let accuracy slide down the priority list. Just have a look at this recent example.

When last Sunday’s Business section featured a story and photo about nine luxury condos and nine boat slips being sold at auction in Queens Harbor, it came as quite a surprise to some readers.
“It was shocking,” said Herb Schulz, a Realtor who sells high-end property in what he describes as “the best development like this on the East Coast.”
There is no such place as Queens Harbor around here. Nor does Jacksonville have a Queens Harbor area, as was suggested in the story.
But there is an upscale development along the Intracoastal Waterway between Atlantic Boulevard and Wonderwood Drive where prices range between $500,000 to $5 million, according to Schulz. Its name is Queen’s Harbour Yacht & Country Club (note the punctuation and spelling).
They don’t have condos there. No boat slips are for sale.
There may have been some bank foreclosures among the more than 900 owners in Queen’s Harbour, but never anything close to an auctioneer under a tent hawking properties.
That would be the kind of thing that happened a mile or so away at a place called Watersedge at Harbortown, where the developer unloaded some remaining condos and boat slips in an auction last month.
Our reporter and photographer were there. Unfortunately, the reporter thought there was an area of the city known as Queens Harbor that included Watersedge.
A correction attempted to set things straight and did so regarding the location of the auction. But it did not go far enough, according to John E. O’Neil Jr., a former chairman of the Queen’s Harbour property owners’ association.
“Folks were upset by being labeled as having condos in here,” he said. Also, the development’s boat slips are not on the Intracoastal Waterway. They are on a lagoon that connects to the waterway through a lock.
Last week’s errors were not the first instance of the newspaper getting it wrong when writing about Queen’s Harbour. Far from it.
During the last three years the paper has made at least 20 incorrect references to “Queens Harbor” or “the Queens Harbor area.” It has happened in Metro, Sports, Business, Lifestyle, in Community sections and in an editorial.
In fairness, some complicating factors may lead to errors. The Queen’s Harbour name is often spelled incorrectly. Examples include Mapquest, Google maps and the Supervisor of Elections Web site.
Furthermore, Queens Harbor Boulevard, which runs through the development is spelled differently and contains no apostrophe. That is because the U.S. Post Office would not allow the Harbour spelling, according to O’Neil.
As for “the Queens Harbor area,” one can imagine the number of marketers who have tried to identify with the prestigious community that is home to several Jaguars players, heads of local companies and prominent retirees.
But “Queen’s Harbour Yacht & Country Club” and “Queen’s Harbour” are trademarks, according to Greg Kaufman, the development’s general manager.
Those names “should never be used descriptively for a geographic area outside the named residential community or in any other manner which blurs, dilutes or tarnishes the trademarks,” he wrote in a request for a correction.
Apparently unaware, the newspaper once wrote about a new store “at the Queens Harbor Stein Mart location.” In fact, the store is in a nearby shopping center on Atlantic Boulevard known as Harbour Village.
Stein Mart lists “Queen’s Harbour” as one of its seven store locations in its advertising.
The errors in Sunday’s story combined with earlier incorrect references to the development reflect an unacceptable level of carelessness. Now that Queen’s Harbour officials have pointed out the problem, readers should expect improved accuracy.

…In 2007, the Star has published 497 corrections, up to and including today.
That’s slightly less than last year’s final tally of 512 and considerably less than many major metropolitan newspapers, including The New York Times, which logged 3,600 corrections in its computerized corrections tracker this year.
The Guardian in Britain usually publishes six corrections a day, six days a week – about 1,800 annually. Among this year’s is one worthy of inclusion in a Corrections Hall of Shame: “We misspelled the word misspelled twice, as mispelled, in the corrections and clarifications column on September 26, page 30.”
I’ve written corrections for the Star that have made me cringe.
Last month, an article reported on the tasering incident involving Vancouver police. Of course, the RCMP was involved in the incident at the Vancouver airport, a fact the Vancouver police force was quick to point out in requesting a correction.
Other corrections made me laugh out loud at the silliness of our mistakes. One of my favourites: a Nov. 19 article about a new study indicating that Detroit is the most dangerous U.S. city incorrectly stated that Detroit has seen nearly one million people killed since 1950.
In fact, that number represents the overall decline in Detroit’s population since 1950, not the number of people killed. As numerous readers pointed out, one million killed since 1950 would amount to 48 deaths a day. That one was picked up and published by the popular newspaper error website Regret the Error, under the headline The Detroit massacre.
Speaking of which, the Star did in fact kill a couple of well-known people by mistake, a practice known as “obiticide,” or death by media. A Nov. 23 item about actors from the 1960s’ TV series Hogan’s Heroes incorrectly listed Richard Dawson as deceased. In March, an article about Canada’s Walk of Fame inductees incorrectly referred to “the late Morley Safer.” In fact, as our correction noted, Safer is alive and continues to file stories as a 60 Minutes correspondent.
How do these errors happen within a newsroom in which great care is taken in writing, editing and proofreading? Sometimes, it’s because of what journalists have come to label “brain cramp” – we know better, but still we goof. Sometimes, it’s carelessness and the rush to deadline. Always, it’s because those who produce this newspaper are human, and a perfect human – let alone a perfect journalist – has yet to evolve.
Still, it’s important that the Star is accountable to our readers for its errors and, more so, that we learn from our mistakes. That’s why, in coming weeks, my office will launch our own “accuracy tracker,” a computer database that will track newsroom errors and corrections and the reasons why these mistakes occur to help the newsroom identify preventative measures…

Those words were written by Orlando Sentinel public editor Manning Pynn in an important column published on Sunday. (Romenesko spotted it.)

Pynn was moved to write the column after noticing a spike in the number of corrections over recent months. “In the past three months, the newspaper has corrected more than a third more errors of its own making on average than it did during the relatively placid prior five months,” writes Pynn.

Even more alarmingly, those same three months “have accounted, thus far, for significantly more corrections of internally generated errors than the newspaper averaged in that three-month period during the prior five years. I’d have waited until the end of the month to raise this frightening issue, but with several days left before Halloween, and several more corrections awaiting publication, the total for October already has surpassed that of September — which was worse than August.”

Something is causing errors, and therefore corrections, to spike at the Sentinel. Pynn points to recent job cuts at the paper:

When the Sentinel tightened its financial belt back in June, it lost a wealth of seasoned veterans, many of them editors. Those journalists not only wrote headlines and captions. They also scrutinized the work of reporters — correcting spelling, straightening out syntax, double-checking facts — before publication.
With fewer people to do that now, less of that important work gets done, and the result is more published errors.

It has been widely, obsessively reported that the newspaper industry is in a time of evolution and turmoil. Many of the changes taking place are fascinating and exciting, but change is coming at a price. It usually does. As newsrooms shift resources to online reporting and other areas of growth and innovation, many organizations are either laying off or buying out staff.

Head counts are going down; yet there is at the same time a need for even more reporting to be produced for more areas: writing for the web, video and audio for the web, writing for the paper… As the economic picture becomes more clear, it’s likely that staff levels will once again rise. We are already seeing ads for remarkably new kinds of jobs in journalism.

But there is an urgent issue in the present: how can an organization ensure the quality of its reporting with less people in the newsroom? In the case of the Sentinel, it appears that the paper is struggling to maintain quality after recent staff losses. As Pynn points out, many of those who left the paper were skilled veterans responsible for quality. It’s not the only paper in this situation. Hopefully, Pynn’s column will help the paper realize the danger of degraded quality and work to ensure accuracy in the midst of challenges.

It can be done, and this issue is as much about the future as it is the present. If a newsroom loses a wealth of error-spotters, checkers and other quality hounds, it needs to begin training everyone — not just a select few — in the ways of accuracy. Reporters should be trained to self-check their work. They need to learn their weaknesses and be given a quick, easy procedure to go through before submitting any story. (Some publications use checklists.)

Editors should be armed with information about common errors so they can check for them within every story. All employees should be taught the value of error prevention, and the ethic of correction. Technology should be used to help check for plagiarism, and to track errors.

Everyone at every level in every section is responsible for accuracy. We have to move away from a culture and organizational structure where only some carry the quality mantle on a daily basis. It’s everyone’s job. We need to train people and give them the necessary tools and support. And it has to be done on a consistent basis. Words and slogans are not enough.

“Every business’ success depends on the reliability of its products or services,” writes Pynn. “If their reliability declines, people are less likely to buy them. Newspapers are particularly susceptible to that phenomenon.”

Other industries have taken the concept of quality to new heights. They obsess about the quality of their products and innovate ways to ensure it.

The current period of transition in the news industry is the perfect time to start a quality revolution in reporting.

How about requiring a personal letter of apology from the person
responsible for an error to the person whose name is misspelled?

This probably strikes some as a strange and time consuming suggestion, but it’s unorthodox and could help change behavior, which could change the culture. Hoyt also offers another excellent suggestion: "creating a database of the most commonly misspelled names,
so that editors are automatically flagged when they appear in copy."
This would be a lovely innovation. It’s also encouraging that Hoyt recognizes the need to offer concrete suggestions to help fix problems, rather than just cataloging them and proffering a stern finger wagging. Maybe the Times could solicit more suggestions from staff and see what other ideas pop up? Sounds like a job for the paper’s internal wiki.